Went back to Chase Center one last time (probably) yesterday to cover Warriors practice. It was good to see my former trench mates, long-time beatwriters Monte Poole, Anthony Slater, Dalton Johnson, Ron Kroichick and Nick Friedell.
Bonta Hill popped in, too, as NBCSBA had a sit-down with Steve Kerr. That was funny and interesting, because Hill and Poole mentioned that my name had come up in a convo between them yesterday. It’s interesting how the universe puts people together.
Unfortunately, as we waited at the back of the gym, PR guy Darryl Arata suddenly told us that Kerr was heading straight to the Bill King Interview Room, so we wouldn’t get a chance to check out post-practice shooting routines. Ah well, less work for me, though.
As we walked down the corridor, it struck me as a from-behind “The Right Stuff” moment — okay, maybe these guys would prefer “Reservoir Dogs”. So, I took a pic:
Most of the gang shown here are actually the newer beat reporters like Joseph Dycus, Kenzo Fukuda, Sam Gordon and Danny Emerman.
By the way, if you’re wondering why you don’t see Poole, Slater or Friedell on our Love Your Dubs Summit speaker list, it’s because they’re too super-famous 😆 read: contractual obligations.
But we did get fellow media celeb Tim Kawakami, plus Emerman and Gordon, who are still a little early and get-able in their journey to super-stardom!
Once we got into the interview room, it was kind of like old times, except I’d forgotten until later from an angry person on YouTube that the iPhone mic is always rather, umm, subpar (his words were much meaner). You kind of have to be in the front row, like where Slater is, plus have at least an accessory boom mic of some sort if you’re posting the entire interview — I’m really glad those days are over of wasting money on those.
But my new feet-on-the-street, Riley Bermudez, he has an awesome camera with awesome sound, so we’re good going forward.
I had prepared myself the night before to ask Steve a question and I wondered if he’d remember me from two summers ago at Team USA practice in Vegas. I had caught him after a presser on the way down the stairs at Mendenhall Center and revealed that I would be retiring from the Warriors beat.
I thanked him for that one time when I ran — yeah, I was pretty dedicated — from the Chase facility in the basement through the corridor (see photo above) and to the Bill King Room, and that day he patted me on the back as I huffed and puffed through the door. Made me feel like part of the team.
Deep into yesterday’s Kerr Q&A after practice, my heart was racing as if I’d run that whole distance, except I hadn’t. It was because I hadn’t asked a podium question since… I don’t know, probably way more than four years ago (!) because I was always busy filming something, versus asking questions, which are two different jobs.
See how wobbly the video gets when I’m asking the question. It takes practice to film and ask a question at the same time:
The mic was being passed around super-efficiently among the reporters. There were even two mics, one for each side of the room. I always like to sit in the back row when I’m the newcomer, so luckily Kroichick was one of the last to ask a question and he was right next to me and so it was easy to get the mic, even with my other hand filming on the iPhone.
Anyways, this time I was determined to enjoy the moment. Adrenaline pumping, heart pounding. How often do you get to feel your body respond to the environment like that? Had a blast (at last)!
Finally, it was my turn. I said, “Hi Steve, evergreen question for you,” knowing that I could somehow utilize this piece of content for the Love Your Dubs Summit — please register for FREE if you haven’t already.
“What’s your favorite and least favorite part of practice?”
I kind of already knew the answer because of being around this team for over a freakin’ decade. To cut to the chase, Kerr’s answer was “collaboration”.
But at the end of his thoughtful reply, Steve almost double-checked with me, looking at me and saying, “Least favorite?”
I truly didn’t think he had a least favorite part of his daily job of holding Golden State practices. Of course, he wasn’t gonna really reveal anything he didn’t like about his job, just in case it ended up throwing a fellow coach or player under the bus.
So then Steve simply pointed at… Raymond Ridder!
Man, it was a fastball down the middle. You can hear me say that on the video. Dennis Eckersley serving up Kirk Gibson. (That pitch still hurts, to this day.)
The people in the room chuckled at the rather obvious answer — Kerr routinely makes jokes at Ridder’s expense — but I actually kinda felt bad because I had made so many requests of Raymond recently. As he’s probably one of the busiest people on the planet, it’s a privilege to get an approval of any kind from the man.
Think of The Beatles’ manager back in the day and getting a backstage pass. It’s probably something like that.
And Raymond took it all in stride with a big smile, as he usually does.
But we all know the real answer: Steve loves his job. There is no least favorite part.
And, no, I don’t think he remembered me as the guy who spent five seconds with him walking down the stairs after Team USA practice. Or maybe he did, who knows.
I also got a chance to ask Al Horford a question about something that I saw in the Lakers-Warriors game the other night, as well as dissected during the Watch Party chat right after it happened, but I’ll save it for another post as this one is getting verbose.
After the last podium talk with Horford (preceded by Quinten Post, which was a shorter one so I didn’t get to ask a question), we went back to the Media Room. I had noticed it had a lot more Jim Barnett references than when I last set foot there, as it had gotten named after him:
Monte said goodbye for the day to the hard-working Danny and Joseph, giving them some brotherly love encouragement as they typed away. Bonta also left and passed by Gordon, isolated in the sound-proof beatwriters’ room, on the way out, wishing him well.
There’s just a lot of camaraderie among the beat crew. That’s one thing I miss about not covering the beat anymore.
Here’s more stuff I hadn’t seen in the Media Room yet. There’s actually somebody on this list who I’m trying to get as a Love Your Dubs speaker:
I sat down and processed the Kerr and Horford interviews with the LetsGoWarriors watermark, posted them on the YouTube channel, and started to transcribe both, but realized I didn’t have time to finish. I was also extremely hungry, then had to go pickup a friend from a doctor’s appointment.
I’d forgotten that a key piece of being on the beat is carefully planning when and where to eat.
As I left the premises, Joseph got a call from PR to say their interviewees were ready, so he told Danny it was time. They darted off and soon after, I left the building, too, which required another walk past the Bill King Room.
I saw Emerman conducting a one-on-one interview with [Warriors player name redacted], which I’m sure you can read about in the SF Standard coming up soon.
Later in the day I found on our Discord server’s automatic live feeds from Twitter that practice was well-covered by my brethren, with tons of clips from the same interviews.
Depending on what you’re doing, it can be a lot. If it’s an article, you’re transcribing. If it’s social media, you’re clipping video.
I used to try to do it all because the social media fed the YouTube post which fed the social media and so on. It can burn you out. And I can’t help it. If I’m there, I just have to do it all. I come from a long lineage of engineers. We love to tinker with processes and make things more efficient.
David Lee used to call me the guy who did seven things at once. Marcus Thompson once saw me filming one Wardell Stephen Curry visiting with a paraplegic, postgame in Charlotte. MT2 called me a “content machine”.
But after some burnout and tussling with some unappreciative weirdos in YouTube comments and Twitter replies over the years, I’ve learned what my true calling is. I can do more from a central virtual hub, online. There are plenty of great on-the-scene reporters out there and I can see all the information before me instead of be in it or next to it. I can process it and curate it for the audience in the way I think it should be: as if you’re also on the team.
No narratives. No hot takes. More information, less “entertainment”. Everything I give you has been processed through my extensive experience with the game of basketball at all levels, the latest level culminating with the best basketball franchise ever, one I’ve covered super-closely now for 16 years and counting.
So, it was nice to see the guys, to feel the adrenaline rush, to try and come up with something different online — see latest Instagram post with Horford in it — but I’ve made the right decision to hand the keys to Bermudez.
And I remain grateful to Raymond for every opportunity because an hour with some members of The Beatles and the people that surround them is, well, an hour with The Beatles and the people that surround them.
The purpose of this ongoing diary is just to remind you that there’s so much more humanity and connection going on with the team that just really can’t all be displayed to the world all the time.
That’s the whole point of the Love Your Dubs Summit coming up October 15th through 20th and the essence of what I do — one more time: register now for free!
There’s always the information: what you read on a newspaper’s website, Slater hopping on ESPN with Malika Andrews after morning shootaround today, NBCSBA’s Kerr interview, Warriors TV posting the interviews on YouTube.
Then there’s the entertainment: hot takes, outrage, highlights, podcasts.
LetsGoWarriors is all about the behind-the-scenes. To try and make you feel like you’re part of the team. To give you an experience, a transformation.
Stick around and you’ll see from the Love Your Dubs Summit and our subsequent Behind-the-Scenes membership, you’re gonna be able to feel that passion all the time. You’re in the gym with the guys, living the best life, not in the peanut gallery with randos who only complain about their lives.
🫶💙💛